


Dionne

by Kuro_Guardian



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, bet you didn't see that coming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-29 11:36:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12630150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kuro_Guardian/pseuds/Kuro_Guardian
Summary: "Sometimes I suspect that we build our cages ourselves, then we back into them, pretending amazement all the while."





	Dionne

_Before the Room and the Red and all the simple mistakes there was a sky that stretched forever. There was a woman with eyes so dark a gray they shone black. And girls – playmates and sisters – there were girls of all shapes and sizes lined up in rows. And the beds that never stopped creaking no matter the time. And there was a lake so deep it held Heaven._

  
_And once there was a girl like an angel. A girl with the bluest eyes and lips as red as blood with blond hair so light it shone white. She came with the night and her smile was like the dawn. And she said, “If you can hold your breath for a thousand heartbeats your dearest wish will come true.”_

_And after a dozen nights of squeaking mattresses. A dozen days of harsh words and harsher slaps. After her smile broke shattered like glass; that lovely girl, when they pulled her from the lake, had the prettiest blue lips and skin. But the thing N remembers is that girl’s face wearing a smile as soft as goose down._

…

The world is riddled with cracks, places where a flexible mind can ease away from danger. But lately the space between the cracks has become increasingly narrow, the bends and twists increasingly hard to navigate. N – Natasha. Natasha can scarcely find the space to breathe. Whether wandering the shadowed byways of cities so old they lean away from the wind. Or traipsing the bright glittery trap of neon dreams that make up most metropolises… All she can see are predators.

  
Licking the moans out of the mouth of a man she will later rob as he sleeps her eyes track the moments of the man across the street. Or would if he were bothering to move. Instead he watches from the entrance of the other alley with his hands in his pockets. Too casual, but she can’t pick out a weakness in his stance.

  
She gives a soft moan as sweaty hands shove under her shirt to paw at her tits. The man across the way smiles and then melts into the pedestrian traffic with ease. A bead of sweat drips in her eye and she could scream. Her current mark pulls back with a dopey smile, “Let’s go back to my room.” She smiles and giggles, but she knows she needs to be running. Someone is tracking her and she has no one to blame but herself.

…

  
_“You are a pretty girl N. And I pity you that. This is not a place for pretty girls – or at least it’s not a good place. And it’s not like it’s your fault you’re here. Not like me.” And the angel girl, H, who is sometimes Helena and sometimes Heather and once Hestia…_

  
_The angel girl gives a laugh as thick and bitter as the fluid men make them swallow as she studies the lake they sit by. “I dug myself a hole I couldn’t climb out of. And what I thought was a rope was instead a noose I tied around my own neck.”_

  
_And H’s eyes are black with the thinnest ring of blue around them, “Be very careful little one. All things have a tipping point.” And her lips are black against her slate blue skin._

  
…

 

She knows there is no one to blame except herself, but it’s easier to wonder what Steve was thinking. Easier even then watching the milk spread from where she threw the bottle. And there is the question of why anyone would store milk in a glass bottle. Steve would shrug and Clint would joke and Tony would have something inconsequential to add. Her hands twitch. She needs to clean up this mess. She can’t clean up the mess they’ve made.

  
Why did Steve give her that order back in D.C.? Why did Steve not listen when she told him to stay away from Barnes? Why did she let him go? If her latest mark comes down and steps on glass it will not go well for her. He is already tired of her “charms”. She has lost the gift of appearing to care and it shows. She knows it shows, but she’s tired of creaking mattresses and the slap of skin.

  
Tired enough that she slits his throat with one of the larger pieces of glass. It’s distressingly familiar – the feeling of thick warm blood covering her hands. It’s depressingly banal. She watches the light fade from his eyes as he twitches and gurgles on the floor and realizes she’s tired. She’s so tired of men with their worthless egos – like Stark, who should have done more.

  
And she knows that’s unfair. Can just touch the memory of his expressive eyes wide with grief… and betrayal. She finds herself leaning against the counter with her back straighten (tight) with a pain too similar to the remembered pain of a brine soaked staff against untested flesh. She isn’t sure she understands why it matters. It never did before. He was just an asset – and assets are meant to be used. But she remembers how he looked at her when she spoke of ledgers.

  
Blinking she studies her hands and wonders why she bothers. Even if she cleans them they will only be dirtied with more blood. Sometimes you make a hole you can’t climb out. Her head turns and it’s only after that she realizes she’s heard tires on the gravel outside. She barely makes it to tree cover with what she’s able to grab, but she knows it’s only because they let her. Turning back at the edge of cover she see multiple figures staring from the windows.

…

  
_H, now Hope or Holly or Hailey or Hazel, spits a mouthful of something N doesn’t like to examine. Instead she focuses on broken, swollen lips and finger-size bruises on a slender neck. “I won’t stay here. I tied the noose and now I need to step off the stool. It’s time.” And N swallows her questions the way she has been taught to swallow blood and spit and semen._

  
_H coughs up something that might be a laugh and then she begins to wail. N’s gaze skitters around the clearing as she backs away. Even H knows this is stupid as she tries to trap her noises inside herself with both hands. It’s no good and angry voices are coming. N does the only thing she can. And when she’s finished she runs away with dripping hands._

…

  
Standing in front of a bank of televisions she tries to catch the reflection of her recent followers. She’s been gathering them, the same way her eyes have been gathering darkness beneath them. Eyes that are just this side of frantic, because sleep is a weakness she might not wake from. Because – because they keep leaving things and she doesn’t know what they mean.

_And she knows exactly what they mean._

 

The teddy bear she woke to find beside her head in a dingy hotel somewhere in Atlanta. One eye missing and still smelling of smoke and she would know it anywhere. It’s Cooper’s old bear Barnaby that he swears he doesn’t still love. He never sleeps without it.

  
She doesn’t bother cleaning up the vomit. Just packs up what little she has when she goes to pay up. Then again, she doesn’t bother to pay up, just bends over the check-in desk with a grin. It’s easy to keep the grin on her face even if the grungy clerk’s gaze is heavy enough to be a physical touch. At least that’s what she repeats as hands so soft they could belong to a rotting corpse part her thighs.

  
At least he’s small enough that she barely feels him pushing in. If she weren’t almost bone dry it’d be a non-issue. Instead she tries to think of a gentle touch and when that fails she thinks of a stimulating one. Finally she groans and reaches down to touch herself. She doesn’t think she can do this.

  
“So they find you alright? Said it was an emergency.”

  
She drags the body into the back office and laughs to find the cheap camera system has been destroyed. N – Natasha, currently Nicole, flips her blond hair over her shoulder and then starts looking for something to start an electrical fire. She watches the blaze from a stolen – oh – _commandeered_ vehicle and carefully ignores the person she can see in her rear view mirror.

  
It’s a little harder to ignore the wedding ring at the bottom of her chipped white coffee cup. Clint bought Laura a sapphire because diamonds are tacky. The aftertaste of burnt coffee only barely covers the salty taste of bile creeping up her throat. Resisting the urge to run ragged, red fingernails through her short brown hair, N – Natasha, currently Noelle, leaves a tip too average to be noticed and does not run out of the door.

  
The parking lot is cold and dark and lacking in possibilities. All the vehicles are old and noisy and one prayer from disaster. There’s no point in trying to “borrow” a vehicle. Her teeth don’t chatter, but her arms are wrapped tight around herself. The sky is a black tarp overhead. She’s out somewhere pass Omaha and it’s every nightmare she may have ever had about being trapped. About losing her grip and falling forever into the hole she’s made.

  
She starts walking in half-priced boots too cheap to be knock-offs. Boots that will leave her feet blistered and raw. Her lack of a coat and purse makes her strange, so she lets two trucks pass her by before finally climbing into the cab of a truck that has seen better days. He doesn’t ask for favors, and he’s gentle when she climbs onto his lap, so she doesn’t do the pragmatic thing.

  
And her thank you is him dropping her off in a two-seat airport too small for curiosity. But not so small that her luggage isn’t gifted a half-burned photo album. And Bruce would speak to her of memories frozen now scattered to ash. Would try to speak to her with symbols and borrowed phrases. Or he would have once – he’s gone now.

 

She doesn’t bother to walk away.

  
She runs.

  
She wakes up in a doorway with Laura’s necklace in her mouth.

  
…

  
_They don’t bother burying H. They prop the corpse in a chair under the yard tree during the day. And at night they draw lots to see which girl will share a bed with a corpse. The beds don’t creak, but no one is happy and N does her best to draw a safe lot. Even if it means breaking fingers and threatening cuts._

  
_It is a long month and by the end of it N is ready to be buried if only to put an end to things. But finally they take the corpse away for burning. The next day, a tall woman and a short man with teeth of steel arrive, they speak of a Room. And N would do anything to be away from here._

  
…

  
N – Natasha, currently Nadia, stands at the telephone booth wishing she were more inconspicuous. But that’s hard to come by when she doesn’t have burner phones and public phones are relics. Doesn’t matter since no one picks up the phone. Something falls over in the nearby alley and despite the daylight she hangs up and walks away.

  
In a library in some mid-sized city in Minnesota she uses the desk phone. Or at least she tries, Tony doesn’t even have the decency to let it ring through. She tries three time before the phone gives a sudden buzz and the sprinkler system kicks on. “Sorry Natashlie. Thanks for playing.”

  
Stomping down the steps through the crowd of chattering people she almost misses the half-melted doll and heat cracked teething ring left by the bottom of the stairs. She remembers buying the doll somewhere out pass Budapest. Remembers Nathan trying to gnaw on her hair. She doesn’t bother to cry, because grief is for children.

  
She uses the cell phone of her latest mark, but T’Challa allows only three rings and then the line goes silent without anyone picking up. Attempting to redial the number does nothing. It’s like it never existed. The shower stops in the bathroom and she relocks the phone before laying down. An hour later she throws her sleeping mark’s clothes out the window and leaves with his wallet.

  
Five days and a handful of hours later she paces the empty parking garage as Pepper lets her call ring and ring and ring and ringandringandringandring… Eventually Natasha, Natalie, Nina and Nicki and Nancy and Noelle picks up the pieces of the phone she could ill afford to lose. She isn’t sure why. There’s nothing left – it can’t be fixed. No one wants it to be fixed.

  
She breaks into a safe house Coulson used to frequent. It looks like it’s been ransacked, and distantly comes the memory of a voice hard with conviction. Distantly comes the feeling of hard plastic under her fingers. Stepping over and around the broken furniture N – Natasha, presently Naomi find the bedroom. Wrapping herself in sheets that smell of nothing and she isn’t surprised to wake up under a blanket that smells of smoke. And the last hint of lavender. There’s no help for it.

  
…

  
_Once a young man with eyes that wanted to laugh, but only knew how to cringe and cry… Once this man asked her why she let him bring her in. And she remember an angel named H – maybe Helena, maybe Heather, maybe Heppa. Remembers how she talked about a debt she couldn’t repay and the hole she made for herself. “I have a ledger marked in red. I hope I can bring it back into black.”_

  
…

  
It takes a week to get there – seven days of figures seen from the corner of her eye. Five days of choking down caffeine and living off vending machine fare. Three days of walking everywhere with her finger wrapped around a trigger. And…and…

  
The clearing is perfectly smooth. No hint of a foundation. No hint of a barn or a tractor that would barely run. It’s like no one ever lived here and that shouldn’t mean anything. Love and grief and need are for children. And Clint was always a child.

  
Clint, who is impossible to miss, the arrow he has nocked aimed right for her eye. She smiles, because he was always too prideful to ask for help. The body hits the ground, but she walks up and shoots him in the head again to make sure. He doesn’t deserve to wake up to a world without Laura or the children.

  
She’s awake when they take away the body. She recognizes all of them. And it’d be easy to blame Steve, but she’s the one who pressed the button. She’s the one who ignored Stark because of his ego – her ego. She could have used precision, but instead chose to blunder through with brute force.  
There is a lake ten miles from here. It’s surprisingly deep.

  
And she wonders, “Are wishes for children?”


End file.
